Installing Pico on Fedora

Installing Pico on Fedora

One day,  I woke up and decided I really wanted a program to read books to me while I lie down or do other things. I did some
research, installed Calibre and fired away and my ears bled because the default text to speech system on Fedora is espeak,
which doesn't have very pleasant voices to listen to. I tried Festival because I saw someone on the internet mention how it
had very good sound quality, and I had a blast picking out a voice I liked but when it came to putting it into use there was
just the small issue of festival being very slow to generate speech, which led to 5 second gaps between every sentence. The
next system I tried was Pico, which I've now settled on because it sounds great and works great, but I am putting pen to
paper today because Fedora does not actually have Pico in its repositories and I want to document the arduous journey it took
to set Pico as the system's default recognised text to speech engine. Mainly for myself in case I ever need to do this again
on a new machine, but also for those to come after me looking for the same thing on Fedora, or for an enterprising packager
to take what I've found and get it onto the Fedora repositories.

The first step was installation. A script already exists to get the command line program `picospeaker` onto your machine,
although a little more needs to be done before the system uses pico by default:

https://github.com/carmenfdezb/asterisk-picotts/blob/master/picotts-install.sh

After running the script the command `picospeaker` should be installed and runnable with `picospeaker "hello world"` or
`echo "hello world" | picospeaker`. This is stil just a standalone command though, Fedora won't use this for the system
default TTS when you turn on the accessibility screen reader or try to read books in Calibre though. We need to make the
Fedora speech dispatcher use pico, so we need to edit two config files. First `/etc/speech-dispatcher/speedchd.conf` needs
two lines modified, change:

```
AddModule "espeak"                   "sd_espeak"    "espeak.conf"
```

with

```
AddModule "pico"                     "sd_generic"     "pico.conf"
```

There may already be a line for pico that you just need to uncomment. Make sure that it uses "sd_generic" when you
uncomment it. Also replace:

```
DefaultModule espeak-ng
```

with

```
DefaultModule pico
```

Then, create a new file at /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/pico.conf with the contents described in the other attached
gist. Finally, there is a sed script that needs to be created at  ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/pico that couldn't be
included in the pico.conf file because of single quote parsing issues, and it should just contain the line:

```
s/([[:alpha:]])\?([[:alpha:]])/\1'\2/g
```

pico.conf

# GenericExecuteSynth is the shell command that should be
# executed in order to say some message. This command must
# stop saying the message on SIGKILL, otherwise it's useless.
# You can use the variables $LANGUAGE, $VOICE, $PITCH and $RATE
# which will be substituted for the appropriate value (you
# can modify this value, see other parameters).
# The command can be split into more lines, if necessary, using '\'.

GenericExecuteSynth "echo \'$DATA\' | sed -E -f ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/pico | picospeaker -r $RATE -p $PITCH"

GenericCmdDependency "picospeaker"
GenericSoundIconFolder "/usr/share/sounds/sound-icons/"

# GenericStripPunctChars is a list (enclosed in doublequotes) of
# all the characters that should be replaced by whitespaces in
# order not to be badly handled by the output module or misinterpreted
# by shell.

GenericStripPunctChars  "~@#$%^&*+=|\\/<>[]_`"

# AddVoice specifies which $VOICE string should be assigned to
# each language and symbolic voice name. All the voices you want
# to use must be specified here.

AddVoice        "en"	"female1"      "pico"

# If the language you need to pass in $LANG is different
# from the standard ISO language code, you can specify
# which string to use instead. If you wish to use
# other than ISO charset for the specified language,
# you can add it's name (as accepted by iconv) as a
# third parameter in doublequotes.

GenericLanguage	"en" "en"


# These parameters set _rate_ and _pitch_ conversion. This is
# part of the core of the definition of this generic output
# module for this concrete synthesizer, it's not intended to
# be modified by common users.
# The resulting rate (or pitch) has the form:
#	(speechd_rate * GenericRateMultiply) + GenericRateAdd
# while speechd_rate is a value between -100 (lowest) and +100 (highest)
# You have to define some meaningful conversion for each synthesizer

GenericRateAdd 100
GenericPitchAdd	100
#GenericVolumeAdd 100

# (These values are multiplied by 100, because DotConf currently
# doesn't support floats. So you can write 0.85 as 85 and so on.)

GenericRateMultiply 5
GenericPitchMultiply 1
#GenericVolumeMultiply 50


# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
# the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
# Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
# version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
# WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
# PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details (file
# COPYING in the root directory).
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.